Cycles AMD HIP device feedback

The benchmarks on the Blender Open Data site uses tile sizes of 512x512 when rendering with the GPU.

When I did my benchmarks User:ThomasDinges/AMDBenchmarks - Blender Developer Wiki the victor scene was not working for me, as it didn’t fit into my GPU. (8GB VRAM). With a new build it looks like out of core rendering is now working. :slight_smile:

5 Likes

Nice!
Just want to ask if there is any performance penalty with out-of-core GPU rendering?

Theoretically there should be as with out-of-core rendering the GPU needs to request some of the information required for rendering from RAM rather than VRAM. And typically the speed at which it can request that data from RAM is slower than requesting it from VRAM, and as a result you will get reduced performance.

1 Like

It can be very high. See the note here: Reference/Release Notes/2.80/Cycles - Blender Developer Wiki

1 Like

Thank you both. So this looks like a very specific use case. Would be interesting to benchmark many scenarios.

I have an iMac Pro Vega 64. I assume that if and when Vegas are supported Macs can’t ever be because no driver can be written. Is that right?

For Apple, a Metal backend is in development. ⚓ T92212 Cycles Metal device

1 Like

Hello,
here you can find interesting benchmarks by Rob Williams ( Techgage ) :

2 Likes

How is the slowest of the Nvidia there faster than the fastest of the AMD?

1 Like

I hope we will see improvement in the performance with Hardware Ray Tracing support.

Personally i am a GNU/Linux user with a RX 580 - 8 GB GPU ( not recent but also not very old GPU ) and for now i am out of the games.

Not the best situation for who like to support free and open source software and not the best time to buy a new GPU.

But for what i understand we will see soon a GNU/Linux support and hopefully the support for older GPU too in 2022.

By the way considering that it is a first implementation without Hardware Ray Tracing, performance seems promising.

hip for speed is a direct translation of cuda, there is a large amount of cuda code stock is not removed (gpu is likened to a factory pipeline, different factory forced hard set will certainly be uneven distribution) in addition to hardware ray tracing has not been enabled.

1 Like

AMD officially released new Radeon Pro 21.Q4 and Adrenalin 21.12.1 drivers. Both come with Blender 3.0 / HIP support. So there is no need for the beta driver anymore.

4 Likes

Eagerly waiting for Vega support added in 3.1 Alpha.

2 Likes

Even if Blender achieves (with or without the help of AMD) Vega support for Cycles,
Linux users will have to install the amdgpu proprietary drivers.
The free amdgpu driver shipped with the distributions won’t cut it, it does not support HIP, ROCm in general, any GPU compute library - heck even vulkan has issues on linux AFAIK.

Edit: maybe not achtually. See below.

1 Like

My understanding is that the Linux HIP runtime and ROCm implementation is open source, not proprietary. From what I can tell Arch has native packages for it, while for e.g. Ubuntu and Fedora there’s a package repository. Hopefully there will be native packages for all major distributions in time, an application like Blender depending on them can be a motivation to create them.

5 Likes

Actually I’m on Windows 10, so I guess I will have to wait less. Without HIP support, lot of AMD card users can’t migrate to 3.x properly, so I guess even if Polaris is not feasible or takes time, Vega should be coming soon. Perhaps without hardware ray-tracing support, since that was added with 6XXX gen cards. Although I did also read somewhere that ‘software’-based ray-tracing was supported in Vega generation of cards.

AMD has particularly bad communication around ROCm/HIP on Linux (possibly due to its poor performance/support on consumer hardware).

As far as I can tell Arch and Blender support is not a goal of the GitHub versions of ROCm/HIP. The following issue suggests the proprietary/precompiled AMDGPU-PRO team will support Blender https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute/ROCm/issues/1345#issuecomment-962816756

As for Arch I doubt AMD will officially support it, which will create no end of headaches for Blender and its users. I am hopeful an unofficial “hip-amd” package becomes available like AUR (en) - opencl-amd that extracts the required files from the AMDGPU-PRO .deb packages.

Worth mentioning no one has got CyclesX working on HIP in Linux, it looks like a driver issue? This has been resolved in the windows driver so it should be possible on Linux… Anyone know what AMD’s Linux driver release schedule is?

The communication there is indeed rather confusing. Hopefully it will work with the open source driver regardless, or over time. I would expect that the ROCm/HIP part of the pro driver is built from the same open source code. Where I expect possible issues is in the interaction with the graphics driver.

I know fixing the driver issue on Linux is in progress, but not sure when a driver with that fix will be released, we hope before the Blender 3.1 release is out.

Yes, it is planned before Blender 3.1. However I’ll see if I can get clarity on if that is in the open source driver or what.

3 Likes